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Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 09:32:56 -0600
Message-ID: <BANLkTikXNGXGD1CaRnSH2OGxTng7JUQZdw@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: ubuntu swap space
From: Scott Marlowe <scott.marlowe@gmail.com>
To: Kasia Tuszynska <ktuszynska@esri.com>
Cc: "pgsql-admin@postgresql.org" <pgsql-admin@postgresql.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 5:34 PM, Kasia Tuszynska <ktuszynska@esri.com> wrote:
> Hello Admin Group:
>
> We are configuring Postgres on Ubuntu (LLynx) and trying to figure out what
> is the best way of dealing with swap since, Ubuntu does not automatically
> come with swap storage assigned.
>
> Nothing but Postgres will be running on the machine.
>
> I have read that we should assign twice the available RAM to swap, that
> seems like a lot.
>
> Would Postgres ever use so much space? I understand if I were to load
> records that were gigs in size but that is very rare or at least I do not
> expect it in my case.
>
>
>
> Any recommendations or best practices?

We have two machines each with 128G, and we had to turn off swap due
to the kswapd going crazy and constantly trying to use swap it didn't
need.  Brought our production dbs to a crawl.  My recommendation is to
have enough memory to not ever need swap space if you can afford it.